Jon Fosse

Facts

Jon Fosse

© Nobel Prize Outreach. Photo: Clément Morin

Jon Fosse
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2023

Born: 29 September 1959, Haugesund, Norway

Residence at the time of the award: Norway; Austria

Prize motivation: “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable”

Language: Norwegian Nynorsk

Prize share: 1/1

Work

Jon Fosse's immense œuvre written in Nynorsk consists of a wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations. In his radical reduction of language and dramatic action, he expresses the most powerful human emotions of anxiety and powerlessness in the simplest everyday terms. It is through this ability to evoke man’s loss of orientation, that he is a major innovator in contemporary theatre. Despite Fosse's negative outlook, there is great warmth and humour in his work, and a naïve vulnerability to his stark images of human experience.

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Book tips

Nobel Prize in Literature 2023

Want to get started with 2023 literature laureate Jon Fosse, but don’t know which book to pick up first? Here, Anders Olsson, Chairman of the The Nobel Committee for Literature gives his recommendations.

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Photo: Claire Eriksson. © Nobel Prize Outreach

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